Vaclav Klaus

Vaclav Klaus (19 June 1941-) was Prime Minister of the Czech Republic from 1 January 1993 to 2 January 1998 (preceding Josef Tosovsky) and President of the Czech Republic from 7 March 2003 to 7 March 2013 (succeeding Vaclav Havel and preceding Milos Zeman. He founded the Civic Democratic Party, and he controversially supported global warming denial and Euroscepticism.

Biography
Vaclav Klaus was born in Prague, Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia on 19 June 1941, and he received a doctorate in economics in 1967 and joined the Academy of Science. Owing to his democratic views he was forced to resign in 1970, and to take employment in the state bank. During the Velvet Revolution of 1989, he was the economic spokesman for the civil rights movement, and he became Minister of Finance after the collapse of the communist regime. In 1991, he became President of the Civic Democratic Party, which won the Czech general election of 1992. He thus became Prime Minister of the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, which became independent on 1 January 1993. He carried out the most radical monetarist economic reforms of any leader of a former Comecon state. Between October 1991 and October 1994, more than six millions Czechs were given shares in over 1,800 companies. In 1998, his party lost the general election to the Czech Social Democratic Party, and he was Leader of the Opposition from 1997 to 2002. In 2003, he was elected President, and his presidency was marked by global warming denial, Euroscepticism, and a wide-ranging amnesty declared in his last months of office, triggering his indictment by the Senate on charges of high treason.